AUT INVENIAM VIAM AUT FACIAM

he said it’s all in your head; i said so is everything but he didn’t get it

The philosophy of what can be known began and ended, despite the many who renamed past ideas — or, rather, ways of thought, for their own vanity. Which is a reference, of course, to Ecclesiastes, the author of which founded nihilism in prehistory.

The philosophy of the Ancient Greeks comes to us from its least luminous stars, whose ideas were bounded by formalism, bent into geometrical shapes, made philosophy seem a matter of debating friends and a tool to woo teenagers into then-sacred pederasty.

The interpretation of the meeting that almost certainly did not take place in the manner told, in which Alexander the Great seeks out Diogenes, was related to me like so:

DIogenes lay basking in the sun. Alexander introduced himself and asked what he could do for the respected philosopher. Diogenes replied: “Move aside, you block the sunlight.” Alexander left him, and remarked: “If I were not Alexander, I would like to have been Diogenes.”

It’s all murky, and this version may be as well as any other, if remarkable for its lack of prosidy.

My mind wandered and I missed the point the professor made, and discerned this from the semi-fictional meeting:

Alexander conquered the world. Diogenes could not be bothered to move from a comfortable place in the sun to pay him homage — which should have meant his death. Instead, Alexander fully understood the import of the occassion: It is not better to be a living god, a ruler of men than it is to enjoy the sun on one’s face. No better to conquer the world than never to leave one’s home, if each makes the other equally happy.

Ontology is the study of the nature of being. The question everyone should ask before seeking to learn anything must be: What can be learned? What is doing the learning? Why does it matter? And so on and on, throughout one’s life.

Personally, I am happiest with logic. And so I am sure I am the one thing I know to exist. By which, it unfortunately will not be obvious to many, I mean I know that I am thinking and I am in this way alive. I cannot logically or otherwise (for there is no otherwise) prove the fingers typing these words exist.

Can you? You’d be the first.

And so when people think it terrible to be an atheist, and to believe in exactly one less god than they do… I have been and always will be perplexed. For I know that I cannot know that any bit of my reality is real in any meaningful sense. Nevermind gods…

This hopefully will be revisited and expounded upon… But really, the only other philosophy worth anything is that of Freidrich Nietzsche.Of course, to understand his work we must take the existence of reality as it is commonly understood as… real (and the worth of philosophical study is to be brought low, to the understanding that neither oneself nor any other person has any understanding of anything whatsoever, so pardon my phraseology).

I likely most often seem to be an asshole who thinks himself the smartest thing on the planet. Of course, I am only smart enough to realize how profound and incurable my own near-complete ignorance is.And this is a gift without which education is impossible.